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time-tracking posts

Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Freeware

ManicTime tracks the time you spend using applications

Need to find out where all the lost hours spent in front of your computer screen are going? Download ManicTime, a free tracking application for Windows and you'll have a pretty good idea after a few days.

Once installed, ManicTime sits in your system tray and monitors your active window. Times are automatically recorded, and blocks can be tagged to help you keep tabs on what type of work you were doing during certain periods. You can also tweak the amount of time before your system is considered idle and customize an application's color.

Want to pause tracking? A simple right-click on the system tray icon and you can "go off the record."

My chart was a real eye-opener. Obviously I knew that I now spend much of my computing time in my web browser, but I didn't realize just how much. Between keeping up on RSS feeds and other streams like Twitter and FriendFeed, GMail, and the other web apps I utilize nearly 80% of my time is spent in a browser.

If ManicTime isn't quite what you were looking for, there's also Slife which runs on both Windows and Mac systems.

Filed under: Business, Internet, Windows, Productivity, Google, Web, Windows x64

Track task times in your Google Calendar with a Gadget


There aren't many gadgets on my Vista or Windows 7 desktops yet. I have a hard time finding any that are compelling enough to keep installed. This handy little one from Raneri Web Design, however, is firmly lodged in the sidebar of my workbench computer.

The gCalTasks gadget is a slick desktop timer that integrates with your Google Calendars. Enter your credential and choose the calendar to track your times on - I decided to set up a brand new one specifically for tracking.

Enter a tag line for your task, click start, and then click stop when you're done. Information is automatically sent to your calendar, where the agenda view provides a nice recap of your activities. It's a simple, low-resource way to keep tabs on your time.

Thanks, Ricardo!

Filed under: Business, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Freeware

Slife tracks application usage on Mac, and now Windows

Slife - a brilliant activity analysis program - has been available to Mac users for ages. For the past five months, however, their development team has been working almost exclusively on releasing a Windows version of the app.

At last, the waiting is over and PC users can get their hands on version 2.0.

What makes it worth a download? Install Slife, and it runs in the background, unobtrusively monitoring your application use. Create activity groups to track applications by purpose - for example, blogging, coding, or photo editing. Doing so allows you to keep tabs on time spent performing a single task with multiple programs.

Set goals for yourself, and see how you measure up with Slife's charts. You can view analysis by day, application, or group. It's a fantastic way for teleworkers (or anyone that uses a PC for business purposes) to keep tabs on where time is being spent.

There's also a team tracking service that enables group usage analysis. Your first 30 days are free (no credit card required), and it's $10 per team member after that.

Slife is a free download for both Mac and Windows.

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Toggl offers desktop plugin for online time tracking

Toggl DesktopNeed to keep track of the time you're spending on a project, but don't feel like keeping a web browser window open all day just to use an online stopwatch time tracking app? Last year we discovered Toggl, an online tool that makes it simple to track the time you're spending on various projects, which makes it simple to figure out how many hours to bill to which project or boss. And today when we were looking for a good desktop tool that does the same thing, we noticed that Toggle had released a public beta of a desktop time tracker for Windows.

Toggle Desktop is tightly integrated with Toggl's online service. On the one hand that means you can't use the desktop application if you haven't signed up for a free account online. On the other hand, it means you can easily choose from a list of tasks that you've already set up. And you can access your reports from any computer with a web browser. You can also use Toggl Desktop on multiple computers, safe in the knowledge that all of your hours will be logged and stored online.

The desktop program will start counting your time as soon as you hit a task. Just click the big red button to pause a task, or if you need to switch gears and work on something else, you can always hit another task. If you accidentally log a few seconds or hours that you didn't actually work, you can always edit or delete a task from the Toggl Desktop interface.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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